Potential costs and benefits of a monetary union for the four MERCOSUR countries Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay are compared. Particular emphasis was put on the traditional and new approaches to optimum currency area theory which were reviewed and analyzed with respect to their validity...

A number of commentators have argued that technological innovation is about to change the institutional structure of the retail payments system. Through the potential private issue of currency via new electronic payments systems – electronic money – individuals will create currencies based...

This paper examines the problem of appropriately specifying and estimating the money demand function in the presence of adaptive expectations and partial adjustment mechanisms. The paper demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting distributed lag reduced form representations of the monetary...

The monetary system in Estonia is based on the currency board arrangement with German Mark. The strong commitments and rule-based features of currency board imply that there is no active monetary policy in Estonia – all necessarily monetary djustments are left to the market forces. Under fixed...

This paper describes the Federal Reserve's analytical framework under Volcker and Greenspan, as it was constructed in the early 1980s, during a period of high inflation. It traces the modeling and policy implications of this framework. It discusses the Fed's actual track record and the state of...

This paper examines a broad set of alternative temporal cross- section specifications of the demand for money as a means of estimating the degree of substitution between demand deposits and other liquid assets. Despite differences in data bases, model specifications and estimation techniques,...

This paper presents new evidence on the dynamics of dollarization and euroization for twenty-five transition countries. Estimates of the amount of foreign currency in circulation (FCC) in transition countries are used to develop a new comprehensive dollarization index (CDI) and separate indices...

In this paper we explore the possibility, heretofore unexplored in the marketing literature, that firms “invest funds” in their pricing processes. This builds on some of the recent economic work on the costs of price adjustment. To do this we undertook a two-year, cross- disciplinary,...

This study proposes the adoption of money growth rules as indicator variables of monetary policies by the countries converging to a common currency system, in particular, by the eurozone candidate countries. The analytical framework assumes an inflation target as the ultimate policy goal. The...

In the debate on monetary policy strategies on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost a commonplace to contrast the Fed and the ECB by pointing out the former’s flexibility and capacity to adjust rigidity, and the latter’s extreme caution, and obsession with low inflation. In looking...